Recently, public wireless local area network (LAN) services that allow wireless LAN communication supporting the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 series standards are available in public facilities such as train stations, airports, hotels, restaurants and the like. To utilize a public wireless LAN service, it is necessary for a user to acquire a user account, namely, a login user ID and a user password, provided by the provider of that public wireless LAN service. The main methods for utilizing public wireless LAN services are as follows.
First, a terminal used by the user searches for a wireless network established by wireless base stations (hereinafter, “base stations”) which are called public wireless LAN access points. By analyzing beacons that are periodically broadcast by the base stations, the terminal can learn an identifier of the network (i.e., service set identifier, SSID), a frequency channel, a radio wave strength, and a security setting state (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-197122). The terminal notifies the user of the thus-obtained information together with the SSID. The user selects the network that he/she wants to wirelessly connect to from the notified SSID.
The user terminal then can user the public wireless LAN service by wirelessly connecting to the selected network, and being authorized by an authorization sever connected to the base station with use of the user account. During this operation, if the terminal connects to a network provided by a provider different from the operator that provided the user account, authorization by the authorization sever fails, so that the terminal cannot use the public wireless LAN service.
However, conventionally, when selecting the network to connect to from among a plurality of networks, the user has referred to the SSID, the frequency channel, the radio wave strength, and the security setting state. Therefore, it has been difficult for the user to identify which among the plurality of networks is the network provided by the LAN service provider corresponding to the user account that the user has.
Therefore, the present invention is directed to enabling a user to easily identify a network provided by a provider corresponding to a user account that the user has when the user utilizes a public wireless LAN service.